Reducing email communication in favour of more direct ‘face-to-face’ contact is in itself a powerful way of transforming the corporate environment and of boosting precious social skills. E-mail is as addictive as slot machine gambling, but it has not been recognised as an illness yet.

Another form of organisational cluttering can be found in the company’s communication ‘pipes’, with email having become the pervasive, used-for-everything tool. From a functional email with a long document attached which you are supposed to download, to a short ‘I agree’, the email is ubiquitous.

When email took over from the fax or the telephone, it was hard to believe that anything could ever take over from the email. Instant messaging didn’t exist, let alone a corporate blog (where you can write/comments in real time for everybody to see) or a corporate wiki (where you can edit anything public in real time). But email is still dominating the communication channels and in some cases it has become something that sucks up a great deal of your time.

Based on my behavioural sciences background, I can tell you that there is a very good reason why email is so addictive. Email and slot machines share the same principle of ‘intermittent reinforcement’ which is the most powerful of all types of behavioural reinforcement our brain likes. On a slot machine, you try several times and the prize comes to you at a random and unpredictable time, so you keep trying ‘just in case’. Your reward does not come after a fixed number of tries or at a fixed-time interval. That is what makes it so powerful compared to other reinforcement mechanisms where the reward comes at predictable and fixed intervals (monthly salary, annual bonuses).

In email, you leave your communication channel open and you get an enormous amount of messages. Most are rubbish, mixed with the occasional, random and unpredictable email from your boss that you need to reply to immediately or the unexpected news you have to react to on the spot. So you keep your channel open and live ‘just in case’, staring at the screen from time to time when your PC beeps to tells you that ‘you have mail’. Blackberry is no different, just in size. The reward (of the piece-not-to-be-missed) comes at random.

There are other reasons why email has taken over. Amongst others, it is an efficient way to record everything, including the fact that you are recording… In other words, you are covering your back by electronically recording your input on an issue or a problem that needs to be solved, etc.

Emailing people sitting next to you doesn’t do much to enhance your social skills either. Face-to-face, person-to-person conversations have been substituted by an email-cluttered environment, which has eroded the individual and collective emotional and social intelligence. Of course email is a fantastic tool! And it is great that we are able to use it. But it has hijacked all other forms of communication and therefore it has become a liability in many cases.

I think this is well-known to may organisations as many corporate environments have put in place some sort of measures. Those measures are usually of the restrictive-dictatorial type: limited inbox capacity controlled by IT, policy of ‘no emails on Friday’ or ‘email shut down for a few hours’, etc. They all have limited utility.

The fundamental change needed is behavioural and the above restrictive measures only have varying degrees of power to trigger or induce behaviours. Instead of restricting (penalising) email, we need to reinforce (reward) alternative options:

• Opt for face-to-face conversations whenever possible. Only use email after you’ve ruled out alternative means. Can you pick up the phone? Can you see the person face-to-face?
• Depending on the technology available in your organisation, use text messages or a blog for short communications (like your teenage daughter does) or a document management system to input/work on documents. Stop sending different versions of documents by email.
• Make the point of enhancing communication and collaboration by having personalised interactions whenever possible. The fact that in some (many?) cases this is not possible, does not mean you should give up across the board. People are still sending emails to other people on the same floor for no particular reason.
• ANY decrease in email traffic is revolutionary. Do not respond to emails unless you are the main recipient (So, no reply to emails for which you are only ‘cc’ or ‘bcc’). And only respond to the inevitable ones.

I am using ‘face-to-face’ in a broad sense here and I’m taking the liberty of including picking up the phone. Anything that could be done in real time, using audio channels (such as telephone, webcam, Skype, etc.) or visual means (body language in face-to-face conversations or conversations via webcam), is better than clogging up the system with emails. Anything you can do to ‘face it’ will progressively disrupt the (cluttered) status quo and generate completely different working practices. Find out what will work for you and start somewhere soon.

Don’t start an anti-email campaign, but a pro face-to-face one that fosters the highest possible human interaction.

If email addiction is widespread, a benign dictatorship regime may work:

1. Don’t ever reply when only cc’d.

2. If you need to reply, try face-to-face or telephone first.

3. Don’t use circulation lists.

4. Turn off your PC or blackberry when done working.

5. Never reply to or acknowledge emails written by somebody covering their back.

This regime is no cure for bad communication habits, it just eases the pain. Explore all possible alternative tools such as blogs, wikis and text message. Protect interpersonal, face-to-face social skills at all cost.

Copyright © - Leandro Herrero - 2008